Sony-backed next-gen TV tech maker to close

A Field Emission Display (FED) TV business partly owned by Sony is to be liquidated, Japanese media report.

Field Emission Technologies planned to have 26in FED TVs out this year

Difficulty in raising funds for “the acquisition of plant and equipment investment” was the main reason behind the decision to shut Field Emission Technologies (FET) down, Japanese-language site AVWatch reports.

Sony owned 37.8 per cent of FET, which planned to launch a 26in FED TV at the end of 2009.

FED TVs are only a couple of millimetres thick. Images are generated by firing beams of electron from carbon nanotube emitters at phosphor-coated pixels.

The benefits of FED include an energy efficiency roughly twice that of LCD and the ability to generate much crisper images and better blacks than LCD can manage.

FED sets could also have been cheaper to produce because fewer components were required to display a picture, FET once claimed. ®